UABgrid VO

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Attention: Research Computing Documentation has Moved
https://docs.rc.uab.edu/


Please use the new documentation url https://docs.rc.uab.edu/ for all Research Computing documentation needs.


As a result of this move, we have deprecated use of this wiki for documentation. We are providing read-only access to the content to facilitate migration of bookmarks and to serve as an historical record. All content updates should be made at the new documentation site. The original wiki will not receive further updates.

Thank you,

The Research Computing Team

UABgrid supports the creation of VOs and provides a set of default web collaboration applications to each VO: a wiki, a content management system (CMS) and a web-based file sharing application.

This page provides and overview of these default resources, some helpful analysis on how you might use these in your own VO, and links to VO-specific public-access wikis.

VO Resource Overview

Default VO Resources

When setting up a VO there are three sample applications initialized: a file manager, a Wiki, and a CMS. There is no requirement to use the sample applications, they are simply provided for some minimal initial functionality and to help explore the concept of how to leverage an integrated suite of VO applications.

  • Web File Manager -- Probably the most useful out-of-box application is the file manager since it is simple and doesn't require customization.
  • Wiki -- The sample Wiki is based on PHPwiki which is an older Wiki application that is showing it's age (in features and looks).
  • CMS -- The sample CMS is a slightly modified Drupal site but is also dated and wouldn't be a good candidate for public access.

Note: all sample tools are available to VO members only. There is no public access.

These restrictions are only for the sample applications, however, since you can add any web application to your VO that you wish. They can be run on any site you like as long as the hosting server supports Shibboleth for authentication. It is also ideal if the application supports at least HTTP basic authentication, since that will simplify the user's authentication experience.

There is a growing list of Shibboleth enabled applications. Among them is MediaWiki, the Wiki used for UABgrid Documentation. I recommend MediaWiki as an easy Wiki choice for now. You are welcome to host your own Wiki instance on your own machine resource and just integrate it with the UABgrid VO infrastructure or we can host it for you centrally. In either case, your Wiki can be configured to allow anyone to read it but restrict edit privileges to members of your VO.

VO Resource Analysis

VO Wikis

One of the default resources is a Wiki. At present the default VO applications have visibility restricted to just VO members and the default wiki tool provided is phpWiki. Because this is not necessarily the most desired approach, this space serves as a hook for VO's that want to maintain VO-specifc pages in a media wiki site. Just add a link like the ones below to create your own VO wiki space here until we can upgrade the existing wiki solution for VOs.